PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT RC-MMA will support the OAIC's effort to establish a comprehensive program of research on older patients with serious illness, including cognitive impairment, and train leaders in geriatric palliative care research by providing measurement evaluation and selection for core projects. In accordance with the cross-cutting theme: measurement of cognition in patients with ADRD and of implementation outcomes, research challenges in this patient population will be addressed. These include difficulty fielding lengthy assessments among seriously ill, frail, and/or cognitively impaired persons and family members who are burdened. It is also unclear whether observed racial/ethnic differences in health outcomes reflect true differences or cultural bias in the measures. Relative to the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) initiative to improve the quality of patient-reported outcomes in geriatric palliative care research, the RC-MMA will address existing measurement challenges through the use of item response theory (IRT) to provide information used to construct a) short-form surveys, b) item banks and c) computerized adaptive tests, and determine differential item functioning to assess the extent to which individuals of different race/ethnicities with the same level of an attribute have a different probability of response. Building on our previous work in item banking, and with PROMIS measures, the Core will (a) assist investigators from the Mount Sinai OAIC and other Pepper centers in evaluating measures, and, where appropriate, in the selection and use of IRT-derived measures (b) collaborate with the Columbia University Alzheimer's disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research in the conduct of research among caregivers to older Hispanic persons with Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (c) support the two other resource cores and OAIC investigators by applying psychometric techniques to items on geriatric palliative care domains from identified data sets of older adults with serious illness (d) conduct IRT analyses on items from ongoing studies of older adults and (e) disseminate information through construction of and sharing measurement evaluation grids. Additionally, through a future Developmental Project (DP), the RC-MMA will perform psychometric analyses of measures obtained in ongoing studies of older adults with serious illness in the areas of stress, burden and biomarkers among Latino caregivers. The RC-MMA will host Research Education Component investigators for hands-on mentoring. Measurement information will be disseminated through: a) publications, b) measurement cores from other OAICs, and c) continuation of the RC-MMA web site with links to key sites for measurement research.